Posts Tagged ‘collaboration’

Illustrated portraits of trailblazing women across art, science, and literature.

It can be extraordinarily challenging to write about notable women without ghettoizing it as “women’s issues,” and yet some of the most remarkable hearts and minds to drive humanity forward have come equipped with two X chromosomes. It gives me enormous pleasure to announce a new collaboration with artist Lisa Congdon, titled The Reconstructionists — a yearlong celebration of remarkable women across art, science, and literature, both famous and esoteric, who have changed the way we define ourselves as a culture and live our lives as individuals of any gender.

Every Monday in 2013, we’ll be publishing an illustrated portrait of one such trailblazing woman, along with a hand-lettered quote that captures her spirit and a short micro-essay about her life and legacy. We’re launching with four portraits — writers Anaïs Nin and Gertrude Stein, artist Agnes Martin, and inventor/actor Hedy Lamarr — for a taste of the project’s scope and sensibility, but will be publishing one per week for the remainder of the year.

The project borrows its title from Anaïs Nin, one of the 52 female icons, who wrote of “woman’s role in the reconstruction of the world” in a poetic 1944 diary entry — a sentiment that encapsulates the heart of what this undertaking is about: women who have reconstructed, in ways big and small, famous and infamous, timeless and timely, our understanding of ourselves, the world, and our place in it. (Nin’s work was also how Lisa and I first crossed paths creatively, which adds a private celebratory element to the public project.)

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East meets West in an exquisite meeting of the minds, hearts, and strings.

Legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar passed away this week at the age of 92. (Coincidentally, the same age at which we lost Ray Bradbury earlier this year.) Celebrated as “the godfather of world music,” Shankar not only brought a new appreciation of Indian sound to the West but also influenced generations of eclectic musicians around the globe. In 1990, he partnered with Philip Glass, one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, on an uncommon six-track collaboration: Passages unfolds into 55 minutes and 21 seconds of exquisite melodic fusion, blending the Eastern tradition with Glass’s classicism as the mesmerism of Shankar’s sitar and the magic of the saxophone, cello, and the rest of Glass’s signature instrumentation flow seamlessly into and out of one another. The result is the musical equivalent of when Einstein met Tagore.

My favorite track on the album is the beautifully restless “Meetings Along The Edge,” but the record is sublime in its entirety:

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A charmingly minimalist cross-pollination of word and image at the heart of being human.

Last year, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, better-known as RegularJOE in the hitRECord universe he created, asked thousands of contributors to submit tiny stories through words and images. He sifted through more than 8,000 submissions to cull 67 contributions, which were then collected in The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1. The hitRECord crew is now back with The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 2 — a delightful compilation of 62 such tender, poignant, beautiful micro-narratives selected from nearly 15,000 submissions. All the stories are made collaboratively — a writer would submit a story to the site, then an artist who likes it would illustrate it, or vice-versa, then others would join in and remix the stories and artwork.

In a heartening twist on traditional publishing, hitRECord is splitting all proceeds from the book 50-50 with the contributing artists and writers.

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Bloomsday — the world’s foremost holiday of talking about books you haven’t read — may come and go, but a rare gem calls for extending the Joyce-related celebrations a little while longer. In 1935, American publisher George Macey offered the great Henri Matisse $5,000 to create as many etchings as this budget would afford for a special illustrated edition of Ulysses. Joyce was thrilled that an artist of Matisse’s stature would illustrate his masterwork, but worried the artist might not actually read the book, which confounded even Carl Jung. His fears were justified — Matisse turned in drawings based on six episodes from Homer’s epic poem Odyssey, evidently having assumed that Joyce’s masterwork was also based on the ancient Greek hero Odysseus, known as Ulysses in Roman mythology.

After Open Culture flagged the book, I gathered up my year’s worth of lunch money and was able to grab one of the last copies available online — a glorious leather-bound tome with 22-karat gold accents, gilt edges, moire fabric endpapers, and a satin page marker. The Matisse drawings inside it, of course, are the most priceless of its offerings — doubly so because, for all their beauty, they’re a tragicomedy of quasi-collaboration. Enjoy.

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